November 11, 2014

Dark Money, Dark Power: How Big Oil’s Intelligence Network Circumvents FOIA

There's no bigger bling than what black gold brings.



Dark Money, Dark Power

How Big Oil’s Intelligence Network Circumvents FOIA

by ADAM FEDERMAN
CounterPunch, NOVEMBER 10, 2014

What if the private sector banded together to create its own intelligence sharing networks exempt from FOIA law and public accountability?

In the last decade a number of different industries ranging from financial services and health care to nuclear energy and defense have created what are known as Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs). They allow member companies to share information anonymously without fear that it will be subject to FOIA requests or anti-trust violations. Now the oil and gas industry is getting in on the act.

In late June, the oil and gas industry announced the creation of an ISAC. According to the group’s website the ONG-ISAC, “is being created to provide shared intelligence on cyber incidents, threats, vulnerabilities, and associated responses present throughout our industry.” The website explains that the analysis center is built around four core principles, among them, “anonymous submissions” and “protection from FOIA disclosure and anti-trust violations.” This is apparently a hallmark of private sector intelligence-sharing networks, even though they continue to share information with government agencies. An ISAC primer published by Booz Allen Hamilton states, “ISACs operate in a manner to protect members from anti-trust violations and Freedom of Information Act queries.”

SNIP...

Although ISACs are privately owned and operated, they still work with government agencies, including the DHS and FBI. According to a white paper published by the National Council of ISACs in 2004, strong public private partnerships are key to any ISAC’s success. “Close relations between the private sectors and the Department of Homeland Security and between each sector and its Lead Agency are vital,” they wrote. Of course, under one condition: Any information exchanged between the private sector and Homeland Security would be exempt from FOIA law.

SNIP...

Today oil and gas companies routinely share information about activists and environmental groups with state level Homeland Security Fusion Centers and law enforcement agencies. In most cases these stories have only come to light because of FOIA. What will happen now that the oil and gas industry has created its own intelligence-sharing network? What will stop them from anonymously filtering information on activists and environmental groups through the ISAC, which is exempt from FOIA disclosure? It’s anyone’s guess. But chances are the public will be kept in the dark.

SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/10/how-big-oils-intelligence-network-circumvents-foia/

November 10, 2014

Same group as the people who tried to overthrow FDR in 1933 had kids.

And they are the ones* screwing America now.

What's different today, is we don't have Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.


Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, share a moment and some information, back in the day.

* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.

Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained seven times more wealth than all of history until 1981 put together.

Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the hard work and little wealth of the many onto themselves.

And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero, their weapon of enslavement is "Neo-Liberal Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down. To the planet, it means doom.

November 8, 2014

Forget the 1%

It is the 0.01% who are really getting ahead in America

The Economist, Nov 8th 2014

EXCERPT...

A new paper by Mr Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics reckons past estimates badly underestimated the share of wealth belonging to the very rich. It uses a richer variety of sources than prior studies, including detailed data on personal income taxes (which the authors mine for figures on capital income) and property tax, which they check against Fed data on aggregate wealth. The authors note that not every potential source of error can be accounted for; tax avoidance strategies, for instance, could cause either an overestimation of the wealth share of the rich (if they classify labour income as capital income in order to take advantage of lower rates) or an underestimation (if they intentionally seek out lower yielding investments for their tax advantages). Yet they believe their estimates represent an improvement over past attempts.

The results are enough to make Mr Piketty blush. The authors examine the share of total wealth held by the bottom 90% of families relative to those at the very top. Because the bottom half of all families almost always has no net wealth, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90% is an effective measure of “middle class” wealth, or that held by those from the 50th to the 90th percentile. In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929. From the beginning of the Depression until the end of the second world war, the middle class’s share of total wealth rose steadily, thanks largely to collapsing wealth among richer households. Thereafter the middle class’s share grew along with national wealth thanks to broader equity ownership, middle-class income growth and rising rates of home-ownership. The expansion of tax breaks for retirement savings also helped. By the early 1980s the share of household wealth held by the middle class rose to 36%—roughly four times the share controlled by the top 0.1%.

From the early 1980s, however, these trends have reversed. The ratio of household wealth to national income has risen back toward the level of the 1920s, but the share in the hands of middle-class families has tumbled (see chart). Tepid growth in middle-class incomes is partly to blame; real incomes for the top 1% of families grew 3.4% a year from 1986-2012 while those for the bottom 90% grew 0.7%. But Messrs Saez and Zucman reckon the main cause of falling middle-class net worth is soaring debt. Rising home values did little to raise middle-class wealth since mortgage debt also soared. The recession battered home prices but left the debt untouched, further squeezing middle-class wealth.

The really, really rich get much, much richer

On the other side of the spectrum, the fortunes of the wealthy have grown, especially at the very top. The 16,000 families making up the richest 0.01%, with an average net worth of $371m, now control 11.2% of total wealth—back to the 1916 share, which is the highest on record. Those down the distribution have not done quite so well: the top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America’s wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak—and exactly the same share as the bottom 90% of the population. Meanwhile the share of wealth held by families from the 90th to the 99th percentile has actually fallen over the last decade, though not by as much as the net worth of the bottom 90%.

CONTINUED..

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1

November 6, 2014

Alabama school district paid an ex-FBI agent $157K to monitor students on social media

Of the 14 students expelled, 12 were black

JOANNA ROTHKOPF
Salon.com; Nov. 3, 2014

Last year, in an effort to improve security, the Huntsville City School district paid an ex-FBI agent Chris McRae $157,000 to monitor the social media activity of its 24,000 students. The effort was part of a program called SAFe, Students Against Fear, where students and faculty could file anonymous tips to McRae who would look through their social media accounts for any questionable material, including drugs, weapons, gangs or sex.

Yes, the security program seems like an overreaction and a violation of students’ rights. More alarmingly, however, is that of the 14 students who were ultimately expelled, 12 were black even though only 40 percent of the district’s students are black.

SNIP...

AL.com’s Challen Stephens reports:

AL.com on Oct. 1 requested public records listing expulsions by race and expenses related to the security consultants involved in the online investigations known as the SAFe program. On Oct. 30, Huntsville City Schools provided records showing the system expelled 305 students last year. Of those, 238 were black.

That means 78 percent of all expulsions involved black children in a system where 40 percent of students are black. Expulsions related to social media investigations through the SAFe program were a small part of that total. Of those 14 expulsions related to SAFe, 86 percent involved black students.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/03/alabama_school_district_paid_an_ex_fbi_agent_157k_to_monitor_students_on_social_media/

Hmm. $6.54 a head to watch what's in 'em? Jeesh. Former FBI should already know that.

November 6, 2014

In 2000, Adnan Khashoggi tied to Theresa LePore...

Thank you for the heads up, TheNutcracker. The People need to know the fix is in - corruption even in our own party.

The great DUer blm reminded me the other day of Adnan Khashoggi's connection to the "Democratic" supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County who OK'd the ultra confusing butterfly ballot and others from October Surprise to BCCI to Arming Iraq to Iran-Contra to...Florida...

What a, em, coincidence how history echoes.

November 5, 2014

Amen! Amen!

What Harry S Truman said:

EXCERPT...

The record the Democratic Party has made in the last 20 years is the greatest political asset any party ever had in the history of the world. We would be foolish to throw it away. There is nothing our enemies would like better and nothing that would do more to help them win an election.

I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are--when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people--then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

CONTINUED...

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1296

November 5, 2014

Udall stood up to CIA.

From NYT:

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado and another member of the Intelligence Committee, demanded Mr. Brennan’s resignation. “The C.I.A. unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers,” he said in a written statement. “This grave misconduct not only is illegal but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intelligence-commitee-cia-interrogation-report.html?_r=0

Not that there's a connection or anything.

November 4, 2014

Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel

By MARK MAZZETTI and CARL HULSE
The New York Times, JULY 31, 2014

WASHINGTON — An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.

The inspector general’s account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency’s monitoring of committee investigators became public.

A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that John O. Brennan, the agency’s director, had apologized to Ms. Feinstein and the committee’s ranking Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and would set up an internal accountability board to review the issue. The statement said that the board, which will be led by a former Democratic senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, could recommend “potential disciplinary measures” and “steps to address systemic issues.”

But anger among lawmakers grew throughout the day. Leaving a nearly three-hour briefing about the report in a Senate conference room, members of both parties called for the C.I.A. officers to be held accountable, and some said they had lost confidence in Mr. Brennan’s leadership. “This is a serious situation and there are serious violations,” said Mr. Chambliss, generally a staunch ally of the intelligence community. He called for the C.I.A. employees to be “dealt with very harshly.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intelligence-commitee-cia-interrogation-report.html?_r=0

Harshly. As if.

November 4, 2014

Absolutely.

Shocking New Evidence Reveals Depths of 'Treason' and 'Treachery' of Watergate and Iran-Contra

New evidence continues to accumulate showing how Official Washington got key elements of two major presidential scandals of the Nixon and Reagan administrations wrong.

-- Robert Parry

Most importantly: Never forget Gary Webb.

November 4, 2014

The Deep State Plots The 1980 Defeat Of Jimmy Carter

Russ Baker asks: "How do Wall Street, oil companies and the shadow government agencies like the CIA and NSA really shape the global political order?"



The Deep State Plots The 1980 Defeat Of Jimmy Carter

By Peter Dale Scott
WhoWhatWhy.com on Nov 2, 2014

The Safari Club was an alliance between national intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms. As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni,

In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. (1)

After Carter was elected, the Safari Club allied itself with Richard Helms and Theodore Shackley against the more restrained intelligence policies of Jimmy Carter, according to Joseph Trento. In Trento’s account, the dismissal by William Colby in 1974 of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton,

combined with Watergate, is what prompted the Safari Club to start working with (former DCI Richard) Helms (then U.S. Ambassador to Iran) and his most trusted operatives outside of Congressional and even Agency purview. James Angleton said before his death that “Shackley and Helms … began working with outsiders like Adham and Saudi Arabia. The traditional CIA answering to the president was an empty vessel having little more than technical capability.”(2)

Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed . . . the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”(3) Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who had been forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by Theodore Shackley:

Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like (Edwin) Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with (former DCI Richard) Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. . . . Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to (CIA) resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced. (4)

During the 1980 election campaign each party accused the other of plotting an October Surprise to elect their candidate. Subsequently other journalists, notably Robert Parry, accused CIA veterans on the Reagan campaign, along with Shackley, of an arguably treasonable but successful plot with Iranians to delay return of the U.S. hostages until Reagan took office in January 1981. (5)

SNIP...

The oil majors’ manipulation of domestic oil prices, combined with Carter’s failure to bring the hostages home, combined to cause the first defeat for an elected president running for reelection, since that of Herbert Hoover in 1932.

CONTINUED...

http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/11/02/the-deep-state-plots-the-1980-defeat-of-jimmy-carter/

So, DU. Richard Helms not only kept the secrets, he and his secret ilk kept the profits.